Last nation standing wins?

Collapse Gap Revisited

In the past Richard has done his best to nudge governments in the right direction, especially with regard to adjusting to fossil fuel depletion, whereas I have always felt that they can go and nudge themselves. You see, from my point of view, only a fool would want to go a-nudging the Central Committee of the Politburo toward adopting better policies. Here, perhaps once there was hope; and now it's gone. Unfortunately, many people continue to believe in the miraculous properties of national politics and policy. However, Richard is no longer one of them, and this makes me a bit more hopeful for the rest of us.

Silly me. Here I had thought that world leaders would want to keep their nations from collapsing. They must be working hard to prevent currency collapse, financial system collapse, food system collapse, social collapse, environmental collapse, and the onset of general, overwhelming misery—right? But no, that's not what the evidence suggests. Increasingly I am forced to conclude that the object of the game that world leaders are actually playing is not to avoid collapse; it's simply to postpone it a while so as to be the last nation to go down, so yours can have the chance to pick the others' carcasses before it meets the same fate.

I know, that sounds unbearably cynical. And in fact it may not accurately describe the conscious attitudes of leaders of some smaller nations. But for the U.S. and China, arguably the countries most likely to lead the way for the rest of the world, actions speak louder than words....

For these two nations, avoiding collapse would require solving a range of enormous problems, of which at least four are non-negotiable: climate change; peak fossil fuels (in effect, stagnating and, soon, declining energy supplies); the inherent instability of growth-based financial systems; and the vulnerability of food systems to factors like fresh water scarcity and soil erosion (in addition to global warming and fuel scarcity). If they fail to address any one of these, societal collapse is inevitable—in a few decades certainly, but perhaps in just the next few years.

That leaves finding a new source of supply. Many oil-producing nations are today quite hostile to the United States, and are far away…except Canada. All are also vulnerable to internal rebellions and terrorist attacks…except Canada, the home of the world’s second-largest remaining reserves. Will an American government really be able to resist internal pressures when Canada is just waiting to be pressured into supplying more? If Americans are freezing in their dark McMansions, unable to get to Wal-Mart or their jobs (which increasingly are at Wal-Mart), no U.S. President or Congress is going to say, “Too bad.”

Every pipeline from the tar sands currently leads south, and I have to believe there would be massive pressure on Canada to ramp up tar mining very quickly if the U.S. found itself running short. And if Canada resisted for whatever reason – CO2 emissions, perhaps, or not wanting to completely pollute the water supply for Alberta and Saskatchewan, or not wanting to use up our last reserves of natural gas to extract oil from the tar sands, or wanting to save some for ourselves – pressure would be applied.

And if American pressure was resisted, who knows where things would go. As mentioned earlier, this is a nation that has routinely protected oil supplies by overthrowing governments and even invasion. Will they allow Canada to keep ‘our’ oil, which surely will be considered a U.S. ‘national interest‘ under NAFTA?